


sky and sea

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2014 [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain America (Movies)
Genre: A bit weird, Community: wishlist_fic, Deus ex Stark is a thing that happens, Ficlet, Multi, Plotless, Prompt Fic, Sequel, Threesome, also, and stuff, angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 11:01:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2770610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Steve doesn't believe he gets to have nice things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sky and sea

**Author's Note:**

> Yakshini asked for BtVS/Avengers MCU – Buffy/Bucky/Steve – “You are beautiful like demolition. You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day, you are going to find yourself again.” – continuation of [barefoot](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1099348) from last year.
> 
> This was _so hard_ and it ended with Tony fixing everything, sort of, and I don't like that, really, but Steve angsted himself into a corner and I'm sorry? I think I'm sorry.

+

Physically, Steve is a match for both of them. 

Speed, strength, accuracy; they are even in those things. They have similar expertise, similar training. They know martial arts. 

Physically, Steve is a match for both of his… lovers. 

It still sounds strange to him, the number as much as the term. But Bucky has never been ‘boyfriend’ and Buffy carries herself with a grace that makes ‘girlfriend’ seem shallow and pale. The word for Bucky used to be ‘friend’, because there was no other word Steve could say out loud and survive the beating that would have followed.

And then Buffy. 

And then Bucky again. 

Tony jokes, once, that his type starts with ‘bu’ and ends with ‘y’ and the in between is interchangeable. Steve doesn’t like Tony’s sense of humor much, but both Buffy and Bucky laugh. 

Both of them. Three of them. 

Steve Rogers, scrawny kid from Brooklyn, the guy who slept in ice, savior of the American Way of Life, gets them both. Gets his. Gets a woman who makes him feel like he can fly and a man who makes him think he might never have to come down. 

He gets this. 

Them. 

And physically, he is a match for them. In a fight, he trusts them to take the hits he knows he himself can take, trusts them the way you can only trust someone whose body and abilities are familiar to you. Known. 

He knows they can match his mile, his weights, his endurance. 

In that they are equal. 

+

“Send in the demolition duo, fuck me, that thing _singed_ me, I am done, Cap. Done!” Clint spits curses via comms and Steve, right in the fray, tries to get the lay of the land. 

They are fighting underground, where both the Hulk and Iron Man are severely hindered. Thor is off-world. Natasha, Clint and Steve went one way to retrieve the hostages, while Iron Man and Hulk went to clean out the Hydra goons. Bucky and Buffy – “The Bees, Icicle, that’s hilarious!” – stayed aboveground to cover their backs. 

But something got turned around and while Tony is wrangling hostages and trying to keep Hulk on track, Steve is fighting a close range battle with the two most human team members by his side. 

Don’t get him wrong. Natasha and Clint are the best at what they do and absolutely deadly. But Natasha is a spy and Clint is not a close range fighter and they’ve each taken down a dozen men, easy, but there are more coming. 

“Alright,” Steve agrees. “Slayer, Winter Soldier. We could use some backup down here!”

“Roger that,” Buffy answers, the sarcasm in her tone only slightly dripping and Steve swings his shield in another wide arc, hears someone scream just down the hall and knows they were already on their way anyway.

He’d protest, but Buffy is swinging a ring dagger in each hand and Bucky is working his metal arm for what it’s worth, both of them mowing down soldiers without pause. 

Unlike Steve, Bucky doesn’t pull punches, breaks necks and bones without hesitation and unlike Bucky, Buffy doesn’t kill, slashes at sinews and ligaments, at nerve points and joints, crippling instead, and that might be even crueler. 

It’s not until later, much later, curled into soiled sheets, that Steve realizes what Clint called them. Demolition duo. 

+

Buffy wakes screaming and Bucky doesn’t sleep at all, wanders along the walls of their shared apartment like a caged tiger, like a soldier walking a perimeter. 

Steve curls his body around their girl and whispers in her ear how she reminds him of the night, but not the darkness, no, nothing that simple. 

“You’re like starlight, Buffy,” he whispers, soothing her back to sleep as gently as he knows how. “You’re like a night sky.”

There’s darkness in her, terrible and vast, but there is also a million suns in the sparkle of her eyes, the gold of her hair. 

You can take the boy away from the art, but you can never quite take the artist out of the boy, he figures, but feels no shame. Buffy deserves flowery words, deserves poems and flowers and paintings.

“I wish you could see that.”

Bucky keeps pacing but Buffy sleeps, undreaming, for the rest of the night.

+

“And then-,” Buffy tells Natasha, swinging a fire axe in a high arc, decapitating a zombie-like creature with a single swipe. 

She sidesteps one of the things lunging at her, teeth first, casually steps onto its neck when it goes down, breaking it. “- he just kind of gets that look, you know – “

She calls the Widow’s name, throws herself over the other woman’s crouch and shatters a face with her bare fist, kicks another’s nose into what’s left of its brain. On the backswing, she takes out a zombie’s knee caps with the axe, knees it in the face.

“- that face men get, when they know they’re in trouble, but not why.”

She breaks bones, swings and hits, chops off limbs. There is brain matter on her shirt and blood sprinkling her face like freckles and she grins at her friend, teeth white against dirt-and-red skin.

“You know the face.” She demonstrates while grinding another zombie’s ribcage under her heels, face scrunching up in a grimace, unfazed by the carnage of her own making, even as Steve tries not to flinch.

+

“And here,” Tony announces, applying pressure to the crook of the elbow of the arm he’s holding, metal gleaming under the lab lights. A knife shoots out of the underside of the wrist, stiletto thin. 

Steve, sketching across the lab, watches, pencil forgotten in his hand.

Bucky, sitting one-armed on a table, grins. “Shit, Stark, that’s awesome. Did you – “

And before he’s done, the mad inventor applies pressure to another hidden trigger and the cybernetic hand’s knuckles sprout little spikes and suddenly the arm Steve has always thought of as a prosthesis is a weapon. A deadly one.

Bucky’s grin grows wider, boyishly handsome, eyes lit up with glee. “Awesome,” he repeats, like a child being given a new and exciting toy. In the overhead lights, the blades gleam, cold and precise. 

+

“I don’t want you to die,” Steve yells, desperate, as Bucky just stands there and takes it, takes it all, because he’s going on that mission, even if it’s dangerous as hell, and they both know it. 

Steve shakes his head, corrects, “I can’t watch you die, Buck. Not again.” He’d say ‘please’, but he’s never been good at asking for things.

His friend shrugs uneven shoulders, bites his lips briefly. “It’s not like it’s a big deal, Steve,” and for a moment, he thinks the other man means the mission, but then he realizes that’s not true.

“You dying on some damn mission for SHIELD is a very big deal, goddamnit!”

Bucky smiles, small and rueful. “You know, you didn’t use to swear that much.”

“And you didn’t use to be so careless with your life!”

“I’ve died already,” he says, “Steve, I died a long time ago, and so did Buffy, so did you. We all died.” His shoulders rise, fall. What does it matter? “Everything else is details.”

+

Steve didn’t ‘die’ in the ice, not really. He slept. Sometimes, he dreamt. He dreamt a world where he married Peggy and Bucky lived just next door and somehow he got to love them both, got to raise kids with them and live in peace and not go to war anymore. 

Instead Bucky died and Peggy made herself a warrior and he spent seventy years encased in ice, dreaming impossible things.

And now there’s Buffy, who Steve sometimes thinks he’s using as a replacement for Peggy, and that’s not fair. But it’s not like he can keep his past and his present separate, like one can exist without the other. 

Bucky loves her better, he thinks, because he loved her even when he was still the Winter Soldier, loved her when he had no past at all. He loved her when she was a lost girl in Russia, running from her past, and she loved him when he was full of holes and missing pieces. 

They didn’t meet him until they were both whole again, or getting there. Steve has never known them broken, only like this, half-fixed, a little singed and damaged, but not bleeding, not anymore. Better than they were, he thinks, but not whole. 

Still he doesn’t know how to fix them.

Maybe it would have been different, he thinks, if he’d really been dead in the ice. Maybe dying truly changes something, inside. Maybe if he’d seen that place where his lovers have been, he’d know what it is they want from him. 

+

If Buffy is the sky, then Bucky is the sea, deep and dark and full of monsters that no man has ever seen before and sometimes, when no-one is looking, the bed of him shakes and water heaves onto dry land, flooding, ripping, destroying. 

He wakes up, one night, with his arm primed for combat, a blade in his flesh hand and nothing in his eyes. He looks like he did when Steve first saw him again, nothing but the killing edge.

“Buck?” he asks, carefully, already scooting backwards onto his feet. The arm comes flashing in a stroke of light and metal, slashing at the space where he was a second ago. 

He rolls, slams onto his knees, ducks another swipe, flesh this time, and another, metal again. “Stop,” he yells, in the vain hope it will work. He’s not even sure Bucky understands English right now. 

All that gets him is a calculating gaze and a ready position, a crouch and a snarl. 

It’s Buffy who puts herself between them suddenly, swearing candy pink panties and one of their t-shirts, Buffy who says, “Hey, Sailor. Remember me?” She smiles at him, sweet and lopsided, hands up, palms out. He hesitates and Steve carefully doesn’t move a muscle. “I’m your Anoushka. Barefoot Anoushka.”

Bucky – no, the Winter Soldier – blinks. 

“Anoushka?”

“Hi.”

His shoulders slouch, his arm drops, and Bucky is back with them. “Barefoot Anoushka,” he whispers, relief stark in his voice as he hauls her in and buries his face in her hair. 

Steve watches and thinks of water as dark as the darkness behind his eyelids, as dark as the ice he slept in for so long, and the monsters that lived there. 

+

He never quite understands the thing the two of them have about being barefoot. It’s a code, half inside joke, half declaration of love, something Bucky says gently in dim lighting. 

“Take off your shoes, Anoushka.”

He gets the Anoushka, part, the Russian version of Anne, Anna. That’s the easy part. But barefoot? He asks about it, eventually, and his old friend shrugs, answering willingly enough. “She doesn’t need weapons to be deadly.”

“Shoes aren’t exactly weapons.”

“No, but being kicked by a boot hurts more than bare feet. Except her bare feet are still like rebar to the face. She doesn’t need to wear shoes to be deadly, Steve.” His grin is a bit dirty and a lot fond and Steve nods.

He still doesn’t understand it. Not really. 

But he’s getting used to that. 

+

He stopped planning for the future around the time he promised Peggy a dance he knew he’d never make it to.

These days, Captain America lives a day at a time, with the occasional prayer for another day, or maybe a chance at all the ones he lost. 

But with his lovers sleeping next to him, he can’t quite help trying to… look forward. It’s not planning, not really. Trying to figure out how things will go, but not planning. A year down the road, two, five. 

He tries to see himself with them, Bucky and Buffy, Slayer and Winter Soldier and he does. They’re there, as friends, as partners, as family. But no matter how hard he tries, he can’t help but imagine them moving on, moving forward. 

Buffy loved Bucky long before she loved him, loves him _because_ she loves Bucky, and Steve… Steve only ever knew Bucky, not the Winter Soldier. They still use that name now, on comms and in battle, but it’s not the same and he can’t help but feel that there’s pieces of his best friend that he’s never met. 

The sky and the sea, they have one thing in common: there are parts of them that no human will ever touch.

+

“I love you,” he says, before every battle, because goodbye is forbidden, by Slayer edict, but he can’t say nothing at all. Steve Rogers knows from regrets and paths not taken and he won’t let things go unspoken again. 

Bucky hip checks him, or bumps their shoulders together, or, sometimes, punches him in the arm, grinning like the teenage boy Steve used to sneak into the movies with.

Buffy smiles, small and gentle, and squeezes his hand but never says it back, because Buffy Summers knows from regrets, too, and hers are saying the words too often and getting burned for it every time. She means it, though, in her silences and that’s enough.

It’s enough. 

She pushes away from Steve, then, and kisses Bucky, short and dirty, laughing as he shoves her playfully, both of them picking up weapons and gear as they go back to whatever conversation they were having before Steve interrupted them. 

A few moments later, Buffy flashes teeth at them, a snarl or a smile, and orders, “Don’t die,” before leaping into the fray ahead of all of them. 

One girl in all the world. 

Her boys follow. 

+

Steve is watching his lovers spar, wide-eyed. Physically, he is a match for them, but good Lord, the way they hit, never pulling a punch, always going for the jugular, the sweet spot, the split second opening.

Sometimes he thinks they’re more brutal with each other than with their enemies and all he can do is watch.

He spends a lot of time watching.

“Jesus Christ, will you stop with the moping, you ruined my science hard-on all the way from ten floors away,” Tony announces, dropping down on the bench next to him, grease and metal shavings all over his clothes and skin. 

“I’m not moping,” Steve defends, weakly, and pretends to go back to the sketch book he abandoned half an hour ago.

“Yes you are,” Tony corrects and Steve hates the man, sometimes, for having Howard’s face and an entirely un-starkish level of empathy, even if he rarely applies it to people.

Because arguing semantics would be childish, Steve stays silent this time. 

“Look, we can all see the way you look at them, like you’re waiting for them to wise up and walk out, and I tried to ignore it, because, really, apart from possibly a homemade threesome porno, I want nothing to do with your weird little ménage-a-trois. But your angst is stinking up the place and Brucie is getting antsy and I need him to not be antsy because science. So get the fuck over it.”

For Tony, that’s spectacularly kind and gentle. Steve shakes his head and answers, too low for the sparring duo to hear, “I can’t fix them,” he confesses. “and they don’t need me.”

“Okay, one, it’s not your place to fix anyone, Capsicle, that’s just arrogance. And here’s a secret about damaged people: they want to fix themselves. And that’s a whole lot easier with someone to hold on to while you’re trying not to fucking drown. Someone who tells you you’re not a complete failure, who sticks with you no matter what, and protects you from the press and runs your company for you, and doesn’t let you slip back into alcoholism just because you hate yourself.” He rubs a hand over his face and they’re not talking about Steve anymore, now, if they ever were. 

“So no, they probably don’t _need_ you. But they want you, fuck if I know why. So get over yourself so I can get back to Bruce.”

Then, before Steve can say anything, can tell Tony either thanks or that he doesn’t need a deus ex machina (deus ex machine) to fix his love life, the olderyounger man is already gone again with a clap to the shoulder and a jaunty wave. 

“Did you put him up to this?” Steve asks, at a normal volume, as soon as the door slides closed. 

Buffy kicks Bucky’s legs out from under him and twists his own arm around until his blade sits pretty on his Adam’s apple. Then she looks up, beams at him across the room. “Put him up to what?” she asks.

Bucky punches out her elbow, reverses their positions and wedges a thigh between hers with a wicked grin. “Get your ass over here,” he demands, flicking the knife away carelessly, leaving him barehanded. 

+

“You scare me,” he confesses, into the stillness of midnight, wrapped up in a pile of limbs, two sets of quiet hearts beating on either side. The blankets are piled high because he can’t sleep when he’s cold and Bucky’s answer is muffled by a comforter and maybe a pillow or two.

“Me, too,” he mumbles, squeezing Steve’s middle. 

Buffy snuffles into his neck and pretends to be asleep.

+

The sky and the sea and the darkness in between. 

Steve is a physical match for them and when the nightmares get them, when the terror sneaks in, he holds onto them and lets them hold him in turn. 

Eventually, without further interference from Tony Goddamn Stark, he stops waiting for them to let go. 

+

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] sky and sea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3785839) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith), [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins)




End file.
